Toronto Poetry Slam

I agree with a lot of your pointa Duffman. I think this shows the problem with Capitalism. However I do think we need to bail them out because their are the major sector for the Ontario economy. If we do not bail them out what will do with over the 2 millions jobs lost? Unfortunately not bailing them out would imacpt regular Canadians more than the CEOs who have a lot of money. We cannot let close to three million people go unemployed.

I do completely agree theirs needs to be extremely stric t provisions with the money and they need to be way moree accountable if they get the money. Essentially they need to be socialized so government complete control of their operations. This would include making them build environemtally friendly cars. It would also mean CEO cannot give themselves raises and to control their spending. Also they should have to make the cars in Canada as well..
Barack already did that buy capping CEO pay if they got a bailout. It is my belief that the CEO need to be punished for being irresponsible. The government needs to extremely strict conditions and socialize the auto industry. They also need to make sure they let CEO know this is not acceptable and on a short leash.

We live in a capitalist economy, but in Canada that economy is mediated by a long-standing (though increasingly contested of late) social democratic political system. State intervention, in everything from social welfare up to the banking system, has been credited with making Canadian economies more able to weather the current crisis than many of their contemporaries.

Now, anyone who knows me can probably guess I'm not thrilled with public dollars going to subsidize some of the richest people in the country at a time when working people are losing their livelihoods in droves. (At the very least I'd prefer it if there were some way to attach conditions, like jobs and wages must be preserved, at the cost of executive salaries/benefits or short-term shareholder profit if necessary. Even Henry Ford, grandfather of the North American auto industry, and not exactly a radical socialist, espoused the principle that it's good business to have workers who can actually afford the products they manufacture. A healthy labour force should come first.)

The bailout is distasteful, but on short notice I can't think of any way to preserve those livelihoods. It's a necessary evil. But it should also serve as notice that we need to seriously figure out a way to re-design our economy so it isn't reliant on the wealth of oligarchs and an industry responsible for a huge amount of pollution and habitat destruction. My heart goes out to the suffering workers, but not to their industry or the products it creates. Until toxicity - and not labour - is seen as a cost, and investment in the social fabric - and not shareholder profit - is seen as wealth, we are on the express route to FUCKED.

And Tripp, that's touching that CEOs have lots of hard decisions to make about what to do with other people's money, but since most of their power is derived from the surplus value of their employees' labour, and since they often have little or no personal stock in the communities from which they extract labour and into which they inject precarity and pollution, I don't see why they should be anyone's concern at this point. We're so eager to punish the poor and homeless for slight mistakes, even though it often means they never recover. It's about time the people at the other end of the pyramid started feeling some pressure to answer for decades of greed.

Under capitalism, a rising tide does not float all boats, but if the bottom falls out, we'll all be scrambling for somewhere to stand.

I come at the issue from the perspective of someone who now makes his (main) living as a federal public servant. And in that role, I have recently worked on the auto file as a labour market analyst.

(the opinion about to expressed belongs solely to me and does not in any way reflect government policy or the view of the Government of Canada, HRSDC or any of its affliated organizations)

So here goes -- GM should be allowed to fail.

Some may think that I'm crazy, but the people in charge have done this to themselves. Decades of poor management has placed the North American behemoths in financial jeopardy. The Detroit 3 (no longer the Big Three) failed to take the necessary steps to reformulate their business after the last huge threat to them, the oil shock of the 1970s followed by the high interest period of the early 1980s, almost took them out then. Lee Iaccoca stepped in and became the big man of Detroit with his strategy that ultimately saved the current framework (and Chrysler) from massive restructuring and possible bankruptcy.

However, if the American auto manufacturers were forced to go beyond their K-cars and to actually wean themselves wholesale off dependence on large vehicle sales (first pickups, then minivans and then SUV's) and a huge, unsustainable dealer network at that time, they may have avoided some of their current pain. There is a line of thinking in the automotive world that had change come then, the American companies would look a lot more like their Asian competitors -- focused on quality, smaller, more agile and better prepared for the "go small" inclination of today's auto customer.

So ultimately, the question about proposed bailouts must be framed thus -- will Detroit finally learn that consumers shape trends that dictate what should be built and not the other way around? They didn't learn that lesson in the 80s, and then Toyota, Nissan and Honda (and to a lesser extent Hyundai and Suburu) upped their game and started kicking their asses all over the globe. Chrysler, Ford and GM are in an "adapt or die" environment and I'm not sure they'll take the necessary steps unless they actually tank.

Short term pain -- layoffs, questions about pension obligations, warranty concerns for current car owners, dealership closures, economic uncertainty, etc -- will surely accompany such a development. But in the longer term, the companies will be more tightly organized and more efficient, more responsive to their labour forces (who would gain a greater say in strategic directions during a bankruptcy restructuring process in exchange for modified salary/work conditions), and will produce product better suited to a 21st century approach to automobile ownership.

If this is really capitalism, let it do its work. I think it'll be better in the long run, though people in the here and now will have to suffer through the implications of the Detroit Three's catastrophic historic hubris.

Auto, as we've seen, is not a typical situation. The union is heavily implicated in the administration of the pension funds and therefore typical fallout from the closing of a large company for pensioners will be different. It's complicated and it's one part of the process I don't fully understand, but my current knowledge on this is that the CAW will be in charge of the funds after any deal struck to help out the automakers. They will come off company books entirely. But how they will be funded at that time is not clear to me.

And as for permitting the companies to fail vis-à-vis our political culture in comparison to the Americans, I can assure that the Canadian POGG principle would be irrelevant if hardcore Republicans had won the debate down south and bailout funding was not made available. On autos, as goes Washington, so goes Ottawa ...

The automotive industry is integral to the North American economy. There will always be plants in the USA and Canada so long as we continue to drive cars on this continent. The only question is -- who will build them? And why must it be the Detriot Three if other companies can do it as effectively, for cheaper? That's the other question Chrysler, Ford and GM must answer to justify their current business models. Since the other companies from Asia have proven the weakness of the Detroit model, it's imcumbent on the automakers to do what they must to change their business approaches to fit the times.

And if they can't do it before they go broke, don't fret -- every single car necessary for sale in North America will still get built. It'll just get built by the companies who are able to do business the right way. It's yet to be determined if any of the North American companies will be included in that group in the future.

I concur. Definitely count me in on this one, on the side of the latter group. Suffering plutocrats who now turn around and claim socialized solutions should benefit the capitalist crowd during this recession after decades of having noses thumbed in the direction of social activists when they were livin' high off the hog is kinda rich. Pun fully intended.

Ritalin what you do with all the jobs if you let them fail and not step in. I think a more realistic and a better solution that does not screw over the workers is for the government to socialize and take it over.

This is a baseless assertion -- a borderline asinine comment -- that adds nothing to the discussion.

What you're trying to say is, as usual, not totally clear, but I can assure you that not everyone needs a vehicle with ridiculous amounts of torque. If you work on a farm, sure, maybe you need a pickup truck. But the average 24-year-old, fresh out of college, working at the call centre, city core dwelling, barely past puberty young adult male doesn't need the added power.

Nowhere did I say that cars wouldn't be built. In fact, I said the opposite -- enough cars will certainly always be built to fulfill the actual demand for vehicles. All I've said is that it's not necessary for those cars to be built by companies that originated in North America. If the Detroit Three's competitors drive them out of business, rest assured those same competitors will pick up the slack and the sale of vehicles will continue unabated.

And just for the record, most cars from the mid-1980s are either off the road or forced to meet contemporary emission standards. If people want to piss money away repairing the body of an old car, that's their business. But the crux of what I'm saying is -- the bailouts in and of themselves won't save the car companies. And if they are not able nor willing to make the wholesale changes necessary, which I don't truly feel they are, then they should be allowed to go bankrupt.

The workers who chose to work for an automobile company know or should have known that there was always a chance their jobs wouldn't exist forever. As a public servant, I certainly know that I can be downsized at any time, depending on the ideological bent of the party in charge and what they would do to save money if they came to my department looking for it. No one has a universal right to hold a particular job until they die or retire, whichever comes first. People who lose their jobs in automotive will be transitioned into other fields, and the Ontario economy will have to eventually learn how to function without dependence on automobile sales.

If this country could find a way in the early to mid 20th century to reformat its entire trading structure such that the USA replaced the United Kingdom as Canada's most important economic partner, then surely we can find a way to survive the collapse of poor manufacturing business models in Ontario. It might be painful initially but it will be good for the long-term prospects for the country.

Actually, Tripp, I was referring to government redistribution of and restrictions on corporate wealth and power respectively. It was an amendment to Duffman's statement that we live in a capitalist system (one which I would like to avoid as much as possible).

I'm not a huge fan of government, but if it went away right now, the corporations would just fill the void and take over, and then we'd be even worse off. If we have to put up with a central government, it should be protecting us from the systemic greed of the private corporate sector. That's one of the things it's theoretically good for. (Practically, that's been sort of a mixed bag at best.)

In fact, the CEOs are not accountable to the workers in any enforceable form as a matter of course in a capitalist enterprise. They are accountable to shareholders. And it is in this context that people want government to intervene -- for government to become a major shareholder and thereby impose greater control over the way a company is managed and sets about achieving its financial and strategic goals.

Jobs are but one input that contributes to a company's overall outputs. So if they can achieve their goals with less workers, then pink slips get handed out. Or if they can't reach their goals and have to retrench by cutting costs and repositioning themselves, then pink slips get handed out. If a company is so poorly managed it eventually becomes insolvent, then pink slips get handed out.

The creditors and the shareholders get paid out from whatever value is left in an insolvent company, and only then are the concerns of the workers taken care of, if there's enough left over.

Companies are responsible for protecting jobs, in a purely theoretical sense, only insofar as the protection of said jobs helps to maintain a healthy bottom line for the company. Otherwise, the worker is simply exchanging his/her time for money that helps them to maintain other aspects of their lives (a family, a home, personal possessions, hobbies and interests, etc.), which require money to be sustained. That is the crux of our political and monetary systems. CEOs owe nothing to an individual worker in an institutional way -- in fact, it could be more easily argued that it's the other way around, in a purely capitalist sense (not that I agree with this line of thinking, but it's out there).

How these theories are applied by human beings is what differentiates one company from another as an employer, but that's it.

I completely agree with Mike and Rit. The problem is in capitalist society private enterprise is not accountable to anyone. I do have huge issues with whole market force philosophy in capitalism. That is why i think a government take over would be a way of having more accountability. This way we can get these stupid CEOs out of power. It is exactly why I would argue for a non market approach to anything. I also even in today climate think a government take over is a realistic solution. It seems in the US their is a small taste for more government involvement which shows that people do want a change. I also would in urban cities would love to see us get rid of are car dependence considering we have TTC and other forms of transportation. However urban cities are not the one these cuts would impact since most people in the automobile industry work in rural and live in more rural cities. I think the government definitely needs to invest in other forms of transportation in the city to promote them. Capitalism and greed for sure is the major cause. This is exactly what happenes when we leave things up to the market

The views expressed represent the individuals, not "the poetry scene" (whatever that is).

I think that it's perfectly acceptable to have the viewpoint that I have, since it's based on my own reasoning and perspective. I'm sure there are many others who do not agree with me. And I encourage them to share their views here, if they are privy to this discussion. Healthy debate is always a good thing.

But yes, the automotive companies based in Detroit have dug their own grave, as have American banks and many others caught up in the scandalous disintegration of the global economy. Rescuing the system from itself is fraught with difficulty and complexity. Check this out in the New York Times as a demostration of the follies of funnelling bailout cash to companies in dire straits:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/business/24bailout.html?_r=1&hp

I understand what you are doing webmaster, but I plead that as this question was originated by Tripp, who has taken a shaky position at best, and this is not a political arena, Duffman's comments were compassionate in an attempt to sort Tripp's motivation and to help him to make a relevant argument (based on ideas) if he were so wanting.

Erasing them from this strain makes this seem that the auto industry discussion is more important than the human discussion, which in this particular forum, i would wholeheartedly disagree....

but then again, maybe that's why I'm not the web administrator.